Senso r less Parts Feeding with a One Joint Robot

Abstract

A rigid object in the plane has three degrees of motion freedom, but it does not follow that a planar manipulator must have three independently actuated and controlled joints. As previous work has demonstrated, there are a variety of methods to perform manipulation tasks using fewer actuators than motion freedoms. The method explored in this paper is to use a single joint robot to push an object on a constant speed conveyor belt. This paper summarizes the approach, previously described in [3], and extends the approach to include the problem of orienting polygonal objects without a sensor.